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@mitchmaine 19744 wrote:

Once upon a time, northern new england and maine was covered with white pine 8 – 10 feet in diameter 130’ tall. The king of England claimed and blazed them all for mast pine. They had to turn a spar 32” in diameter 67 feet from the stump. The king owned them trees and It was against the law to cut them.
Now and then while working on old barns and houses here, we run into a wide piece of pine sheathing 26 – 30” across. Not in a place of importance like waiscoating or flooring, but up in an attic or open chamber as a floor board or sheathing. Someplace that a farmer might go with his neighbor to pull of a pint of cider and chat. Maybe look at that board and drink the kings health so to speak.
It’s much easier to pit saw a smaller cant into boards. I wonder if that wide plank has another purpose. I’m saving my pea seeds and they are hanging in our shed rafters drying out for next spring. Not cause I can’t afford pea seed, but because I want to tell Monsanto to stick their seed where the sun don’t shine. Like that old farmer might have drank to the health of his king.
Our well intentioned congressmen and women get their agricultural information from high paid lobiests working for corporations that want nothing less than to own our food.
If the framers of our constitution could have anticipated such a thing I’m sure they would have included food along with guns in the 2nd amendment. Imagine it. Owning the seed and food.

mitch

i thought the scheme fell apart, but oh well. and one thing is owning the seeds, another having a monopoly. and a food monopoly in multinational EU is something some powerful forces going against it (read:every state who doesn’t have it)
and don’t forget EU is really strict with using GMO, they’ve made a strict law on GMO. organic always has the right of way.
as for old seeds, luckilly you’ll always be able to rely on us 😉
at least for smaller surfaces, if ya need it we can supply it. found some really old-school maize variations in local market, and planted them this year.
there’s NO WAY EU’s gonna inforce something so rediculous here, with all the government inefficiency, bribery, etc. so people will still grow their own seed in at least some surfaces…. i hope.

we in the balkans still have huge issues with all the legislature we have to obey. most is good (like GMO laws), but some is bad.
i LOLed when i listened to a sebrian speaker asking:”how are you going to explain to a country man that he can’t slaughter his pigs in his yard or bake his own rakija?”
i had a feeling “that country man” would drive an ax right between the eyes of anyone forbidding him these things.

[bivol]

hi!

Tim, you’re right, we have here enough experienced teamsters who could contribute, but we’d need a guideline, and i guess making articles based on them asking and we giving our opinions (covering a certain subject, like riding, for ex.) would help diversify.

if they’d ask, i guess we’d help them, but is asking really necessary?
from the founding of this forum we have covered lots of ox-related topics, and in lots of them there are real gems in form of answers, ideas, knowledge, guidelines, and experiences…
i tried to keep track by writing some of ox-man-ship-related forum stuff, and came to the conclusion we are really stacked with useful info.

if they’d ask something we here haven’t discussed here, i think we’d do our best to try to help, but since there are lots of useful subjects to pick from here, i’d advise that writers of RH at least read some of older threads in search for knowledge and ideas.

that’s my guess how we can help…. aside from answering questions.

also, i’m sorry to take a wild guess, but subjects concerning oxen in RH are, i presume, related to local new-england ox driving traditions. diversifying the subjects by adding ideas and experiences from other countries (aside Canada) could help diversify, esp. if the articles are “alike”.

i’ve never red rural heritage (i’d love to though), so, if it isnt already there, maybe a small “international” section, in which working animals – breeds, working conditions, management, technology, int. history, and so on- around the world could be covered.
say, caravans on silk road, mining mules of china, oxen in chile, elephants, and so on…

[bivol]

guess you can make (toilet) paper out of them…. or chop or rough mill them for bedding for pigs or poultry… i’m worried about knobs abbility to retain moisture:confused:. since chicken manure has lots of nitrogen, lots of potassium in the knobs should make it a bomb-shell manure.

stuff them in between plank walls of an open field pig house, for isolation. newspaper could do well, but i guess knobs are more weather resistant. i haven’t tried all these things up, but i guess they should work.

hard-to-break-down mulch. sounds good to me…

[bivol]

wow!

nice stuff, could be useful in home gardening, esp. if i’d put it together with pot irrigation, 3x more efficient than conventional surface watering (here)

that’s one of the reasons i like this forum so much, always kind people bring forth good practical ideas!

thanks!

[bivol]

unfortunatelly growth is in minds of people indistinguishable from material gain.

but you said right, there is only so much land. i’d only add that land is getting less and less, so we’ll have to think of something.

now, i don’t think there’s a problem in growth itself, but in how it’s achieved: we do it (as a species) so it hurts us all and everywhere we live.

if we’d do it “sustainably”, i guess there would be no reason we couldn’t travel to the stars one day, no to say.

i guess sustainable growth is theorethically possible, if we as a society:
1. produce food locally and without waste energy
2. use every renewable energy source possible.
3. wisely distribute energy without unnecessary waste (hospitals and such institutions would have the supply priority.
4. use the remaining resources, once the basic society needs are satisfied, to fund and develop new technologies.
that’s the nearest thing i can imagine to sustainable growth. here growth being a small but sophisticated high-tech industry, not material growth of the entire society.

[bivol]

@dlskidmore 19840 wrote:

So are you saying this method is not practical in typical European/American soil? Or is there a plow that can turn a smaller amount of heavy soil at a time and stay light enough for a single ox?

it isn’t so much that plowing with smaller plows isn’t practical in Europe/America, the technological development led to different design whatsoever in the west.
to see the plows in question check out this site. the plows stayed this way pretty much till second agricultural revolution in 18th century.

in short, yes there is.
either a modern small one horse plow or one of those homemade chinese plows, seen them plow on clay soil.

i was referring to the beginnings of moldboard technology, which needed to be downsized in east, and in the west, the people using it thought that only a big strong tool could do the job. so untrue, but oh well. here you have some pics.

here is a european light tilt-moldboard plow, which is often referred as an ard, i think wrongly. this is a donnerupland plow, that was tilted (evidence: more worn-off one side of the iron blade) while plowing to produce a furrow.

this is the orig site.

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@Ixy 19810 wrote:

I do certainly enjoy working a single ox personally, not sure why there is such emphasis on pairs in western ox culture? Ploughing a flooded field in this way seems a good idea!

there are a few reasons:

1) historical heritage; we’re simply driving oxen in pairs because “it was always done”.

in the beginning, the chinese also hitched their oxen in pairs.
but, when they started cultivating rice in flooded fields, the nature of plowing wet mud led to the development of the chinese tilt-moldboard plows (that is, a plow which you must tilt to the side to throw a furrow), and they were still lighter (so not to damage the rice paddy and not to fall into the mud) and used on soft paddy soil, or mud which made it easier on the animal.

this (light plowing tool and, compared to the heavy soils of Europe, little soil resistance), coupled to great population density (and lack of food for more animals), was what introduced plowing with a single ox.

2) technology:

1. we had no singletree up untill the medieval times.
without the singletree, the only efficient way to harness the power of the animals was to work them as a pair and tie the pole of the plow or cart to the yoke.

2. the european moaldboard plow was developed for plowing moist heavy grasslands, basically to plow under the grasses which always kept returning when an ard was used. chinese dealt with weeds by flooding the fields, while we needed a big tool to dig them under.
so, eu. moldboard was a large heavy tool that needed far more than even a single team to pull.

so, there was no interest to hitching up a single ox. it was simply too weak for any plowing, esp. with out moldboard.

our fields were bigger and population density was lesser than in china, so we had larger pastures, in most places.

second, for smaller plots oxen were – simply bred smaller, so they would as a pair be small enough to feed as a pair, like in peru.

[bivol]

mat, a great insight! after you pierce the nose, how do you insert the rope? and, do you do it right away, or wait?
hearing your story, i now know how the indians could pierce the noses with minimum of payne for the cattle. it’s often our own, western, point of view¸, to confuse nose rings with nose ropes, and then brand the peoples using this technology (not only indians, but the entire far east!) as cruel, when they are in fact only being practical.

thanks oxnun, will try my best! 😀

ixy, what you said is completely true, and even worse is how they treat running bullocks.
but i was refering to the roots roots of their knowledge, which is very old, and these modern people use these sophisticated systems (or rather, use a system in a sophisticated way) without knowing its long roots. when compared to nations like cubans and parts of argentina, indians are more than fair. in cuba and agrentina mature wild oxen are worked with nose rings and violently broken in withpout any attempt to actually tame them beforehand.
it’s dangerous for teamsters and a living hell for the oxen.
and i think it’s fair to say because they don’t know of any other methods to approach and work with cattle.
so from this point of view the knowledge indians posses is a valuable knowledge indeed.

i’ll post another thread shortly, dedicated to far eastern plowing style.

[bivol]

great idea!

i researched silvopasture a bit, and like it very much, here are some addresses:

http://www.forestry.ky.gov/programs/stewardship/Agroforestry.htm

Minnesota

http://www.unl.edu/nac/silvopasture.htm

and grazing cattle in mixed tree and grassland is the closes to where cattle originally lived, auerochs originally lived in such conditions at the edges of forests and mixed forest grassland.

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@clayfoot-sandyman 19351 wrote:

Hello all.

Had a chat last week to a friend who works for an organic ag. research institute who told me about a conference on sustainability in agriculture he recently went to.
He came away very depressed from a presentation on sustainable futures in dairy farming – the dairy farm being the most fossil fuel consuming and CO2 ommitting of all aspects of farming.
The speaker put forward that the only way to decrease dairy farming’s carbon footprint was to push the cow harder – projecting milk yields of 30% more in the next 20 years through breeding practises and the use of GM crops for feed (supposedly cutting down on the need for as much fertiliser/tractor work and upping proteins etc).
The interesting thing that my friend told me was that the ‘model’ used to project how much carbon is ommitted in a cow’s life including fuel to heat water in the dairy, run machinery, electricity etc which this whole proposition of further pushing the dairy cow harder is based upon does not offset the outputs with the soils natural ability to sequester CO2 because the science is not ‘robust’ – i.e too many unpredictables for strict numerical analysis. However some researchers have proposed that by maintaining herds of cattle grazed outdoors in summer and housed in winter large areas of grassland are required which offset all CO2 outputs from cattle plus sequestering up to 60% of human made carbon.
So the poor old dairy cow will be further enslaved to business interests at the
expense of her health and ability to express her natural instincts. Being a friend of cows this makes my heart heavy I have to say.
What we really need to do is look at our diets in relation to land use, this is mere speculation but I think there is a milk/meat ratio in our diet which would correlate to a productive capacity of a given locality, farmed in a way which would keep the land vital and abundant for eternity and would equally preserve our integral health through the right quantity and quality of meat/dairy intake….:)

Ed

the speaker is either payed to talk like this, or has the inelligence of a averige politician from my country.

or both.

and i’m also sad to see good cattle, or any other animal, spending their lives without ever seeing something natural.

i red a similar thing in “One-straw revolution” a book i would warmly encourage everyone to read, where the author was also on one such conference, after his remarks he was silenced, and he came to the conclusion such conferences were funded by big business who had no interest in going bankrupt themselves when natural, low input-(but still good-yield) farming would have a comeback- so my idea is that they form conferences to channel the worries of people to their own benefit-and profit.

it’s unfortunate (for these big companies), but they will inevitabelly have to disappear, simply because there is no use for them in low-input farming.
but i guess they’ll fight viciously, and with their money, manipulation of public via media, and influence being big in politics too, we have some problems, i guess.

although the problems are not as huge as they seem. people forget that history is seldom a straight line, and that other, unexpected things happen that knock the powerful off. like shortage of fossil fuels, through war, or otherwise…

that would solve most problems i guess, even if it looks like it would only enlarge them.
without fossil fuels transporting food long distances will become uneconomical, so it will have to be grown more-or-less locally. because of no fossil fuels big machinery and chemical fertilisers will become unavailable, and if quick and sincere enough a shortage, i see the government requisitioning the vast farmlands because they can’t pay the taxes, and allotting land to citizens to make their farms on it. local farming. with animals, wee need fertilizer.

while we’re at it, out animal sciences professor told us, when he got a bit drunk in company of an american analyst back in the ’80s, that this guy told him some interesting stuff.
american politics plans everything in 40 years cycles, and they work on making these things true. like a cow that’s constantly producing the same amount of milk with no calvings.
but i don’t think it’s going to go that way.

out civilization is the only one who created an illusion that mankind can go forever on upward course, to presumably some eternal bliss, but it simply isn’t true.
the politicians and big bussiness feeds people with such illusions, or something else to keep their minds off it. and people gladly eat it, because it’s easier to believe in an obvious but nice illusion, than dig for the ugly truth.

with the entire scheme out, lots of people would choose to go back to the countryside, buy land, and “dig in”, and effectively stop being consumers!
and that scares our politicians the most, if we cut our spending! which we will have to.

natural cycles of both nature and human society are those of prosperity and disaster, and to deny this is not realistic.

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@jac 19428 wrote:

I think the car did dismantle communities but not till much later. over here we have small rural villages that were populated by farm workers and folks connected with local trades ie wheelwrites and blacksmiths not to mention small butcher, bakery and grocers shops… now they are filled with lawyers and doctors who just sleep there and dont even use any local shops{nearly all gone} because they buy their food at “Crapco” on the way home. And because they can afford to buy houses so easily the prices have skyrocketed and real country folk cant afford to stay.. We had a local silage contractor told to stop by the police because of the noise !!! these people have no sense of urgency at harvest time….
I like the idea of a beef x for a house cow.. Ayrshire/Angus mabey…
John

i’l try to read though all the pages, just cought up, but i can’t miss this part!

a similar thing happened in istria, where an old farmer and Boskarin lover kept his cattle in traditional wooden stables in the countryside.

now, istria is becoming more of a tourist destination with rich people buying pitoresque traditional farms stables and converting them to weekend houses.

so, this old man’s stable was “semi-deteached” to another stable that was bought by some well-standing man (think a foreigner), and he started complaining to the old farmer that he sould get rid of the cattle because they stink and bellow. the old man told him:” these cattle were here well before me, and well before you. they have the right of stay.”

so the guy backed off, there was no way he could make the ld man give up his cattle, legally or otherwise.

the prices are sky-rocketing there, too. with same consequences.

[bivol]

@jac 19306 wrote:

This is a great web site.. press a few plastic buttons on the puter and all the info is there on the screen. Its strange how the American and indeed the British public turned away from lean meat to the Herford/Angus type with the higher fat cover and now its full circle and the demand for leaner meat again. Is there any of these cattle families with a web site ? These old breeds facinate me …
John

it’s because meat with more fat in and between the muscles tastes better to people;)
in the past, lean meat was all that was possible to buy, and if slaughtered in cold and left for a few days to cur, it can be very nice too, strong tasting, although fat meat is nice, too.

i guess demand for lean meat is partly because of “cholesterol craze” (cholesterol IS necessary in not too big amounts), and partly because of city lifestyle where people don’t move much and all the fat transforms into body fat. from this point lean is ok, but don’t fall for cholesterol craze.

and while we’re at it, i red somewhere that grass-fed beef contains six times more omega 6 fatty acids than oh-so-popular fish.

this is extra, non related, i just kept going…. 😮

in the past podolians were walked over from scorched plains in Hungary to the markets in Vienna and Venice.
it was a booming bussiness, and nobility filled its coffins by taxing, or raising and selling the herds podolian steers for the markets.
podolian steers (for oxen and beef in cities) were a valuable income in croatia and bosnia too.
these steers were prized for their ability to travel on scorched grass and corn straw in the fields without losing much weight. i guess the fat accumulated was sort of traveling fuel to reach the market in realonable condition.

and in former A-H, in croatia at least, working podolian oxen were almost never sold at the market – the demand was so high that the buyers came to the farm!

[bivol]

nice one!
a riding ox AND a round-up horse in one piece!

guess Angus beats the traditional view and shows just how vertisile cattle can be. cattle have as much potential for stockmanship, riding and related work, as horses (even if it’s a random search to find it), and people who think only horses have such potential forget that horses were bred for various specific purposes revolving around work for centuries while cattle weren’t.
so if a random, non-selected-for-riding steer like Angus can do rounding up and riding with such ziel, and obvious attention and care, this shows that some cattle have this kind of “talent” too!

i’d feel loads safer on an average riding ox than on the best horse money can buy! i know i’m biased, but don’t blame me, i’m an ox-person!:D

i’d really like to know more about pack-and-riding use of bovines, it’s so neglected, and can be so useful!

[bivol]

well, first i’d like to say that i’ve never had this cross so i’ll try to judge from what i know, even if it isn’t hands-on.

i mean, why not?
size end temper seem to be good.

colour – but i’d be worried if you get solid black calves, because they heat too much in the sun, and that’s not very practical if they have to work in the sun. and the weather IS getting warmer.

second are hooves, if they’re dark you’re ok to go if not, they’ll wear out faster.

yes, hybrid vigor will really help a lot, cross-breeds will be healthier, longer-lived, and tougher than either of the high-performance breeds they come from. at least you won’t need to worry about your animals be sensitive. more they’ll be tough!

third is the temper – now some say holsteins are placid and some holsteins are a bit nervous. and male animals have different dispositions than female ones. so i’d castrate while they’re small. just me though.

so, they can make good, tough, working animals of medium size that are not sluggish, but also not as high-strung as pure jersey. just remember that they carry jersey blood in them, and be on top always.

of yeah, another thing, very important, being a cross they will not put flesh on as much and as quick as say a beef cross, which is less trouble as they get older, and if you don’t work em for a while.

[bivol]

@mathuranatha 19727 wrote:

In close proximity to parked cars etc nose ropes can be very precise avoiding cars by inches confidently . But one of my friends who insists on driving only by voice has scraped and damaged a car sometimes .:p.

I have been to India probably 30 times over the last 3decades or so .The Indians are very practical .They use voice control as well as nose reigns

keep drivin them bullocks — mat —

yep, indians are practical!

and worshiping bovines as holy animals and having an ancient stockman culture no one can persuade me they use nose rings because they don’t know other means to control oxen.
in fact, if THEY use them, it’s the strongest evidence of how practical the nose rope system is.

voice commands can be pretty good and enough in a traditional rural setting, but today, in the cities, and in now-mechanized rural setting, when a tractor comes thundering past your wagon, you may need extra precision to avoid problems!

Mat, do you know any ox-related stories from India?

*ponders to himself*
I’m curious about one thing: here in the west i guess metal rings are prefered because ropes are believed to cause infections in the noses, especially in warm humid weather. yet, india is for a good part warm and humid and nose ropes are used, without major problems i i think…
i’d like to know details about the system – how to treat the animals until the wound settles, in what weather to do the piercing,…

i have a friend over here who has cattle (traditional busha) and he’s considering raising a pair of oxen. now, maybe nose ropes would be a good idea to teach these high energy steers to work quickly and obediently.

P.S. i was really busy till now, but now i can take a breather, so time to spend some time here!…

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